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The Long Now Foundation

Submitted by AliaK on Sun, 06/17/2007 - 18:34

"In the early 90s a group of people were attracted to each other because of their shared interest in the idea of time, and in the idea of responsibility for the future. This group of people came to call themselves the Long Now Foundation."

"We felt that there was a need to create some new form of human thinking about Time. We were all aware that everything was getting faster."

"We were also aware as we looked around that most of the ambitions and objectives of people in corporations and in government, even in education had become closer and closer in terms of time so corporations were living in fear of their quarterly results and politicians were living in fear of the next opinion poll. There seemed to be an ever - decreasing horizon into the future and very little encouragement from people in any direction to lay long term plans. No politician wants to start on a plan that doesn't yield results pretty quickly at least within his or her term of office. The worst thing of all is if it yields results in the opposition's term of office and of course the media don't help this by always focusing on things that seem like blue sky projects and criticising them as being stupidly idealistic and pointless."

"We thought that there was first of all the need for an organisation that would celebrate that kind of thinking, that would ally with it, that would support it, that would encourage it and in fact would try to do it itself."